The ClientWise Blog

Ray Sclafani

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Expand client marketing via LinkedIn As the premier professional network on the Internet, LinkedIn is a great place to make professional connections and network for potential clients. If your Compliance Department permits social networking and activity on LinkedIn and you aren’t there already, it’s the place to start your social networking journey.

These 15 tips are designed to help you carve out a social networking identity on LinkedIn. Start by creating a LinkedIn profile, then find professionals to connect with and branch out from there. More than 467 million Americans have LinkedIn profiles and it’s a great place to prospect for potential clients.

You can also network with your high school and college alumni friends, professional colleagues in your community and across the country, and hundreds of other people. The possibilities are endless.

As always, it’s important to review and understand your firm’s compliance regulations and approach to social media before beginning any new strategy. Stay current on the industry regulations as with any digital marketing approach, this is a fast moving and ever changing environment.

1 Create a LinkedIn profile:If you’re not already on LinkedIn, it’s one of the best places to begin. Join and create a simple profile listing your current and past job titles and employers, a description of what you do now, your degrees, your skills and links to your firm’s website and your interests. Run that by the Compliance Department, post it and you’re on your way.

2 Update a LinkedIn profile:Go through your contacts and address book to find clients, potential clients, colleagues, friends, acquaintances, neighbors and anyone else in your online and offline networks. Not everyone you know will be on LinkedIn, but as the preferred professional social network, many will be. So start there.

3 Mine the networks of your connections:Once you’ve got some connections, check out your connections’ networks and see what professionals you know in their networks. Then extend invitations to those professionals.

Rick Kent (founder of the suburban Atlanta-based Merit Financial Group) was actively seeking to grow his business – both organically and acquisitively. The former approach was yielding tremendous success, while the latter was proving to be a far more difficult challenge.

There’s no question that mergers and acquisitions of advisory practices are complex and emotionally-charged undertakings. Keep in mind that the seller is considering relinquishing control not just of an asset, but essentially of their life’s work. In many instances, their practice is tantamount to an adjunct family member. It’s a stumbling block that Kent had become all too familiar with. “The seller wants a deal to come together, but psychologically there’s a deep seated fear that when they pull away from the business, everything’s going to crumble,” according to Kent. “It’s far less about the money and price of the deal, and far more about the psychological impact of selling the business. There needs to be an extraordinary amount of trust established for any deal to succeed.”

This past weekend the NFL announced for every Re-Tweet they will make a $5 donation. @NFL will donate up to $5 MILLION! Here's the article but before you go be sure to retweet - http://www.nfl.com/salute.

Nearly a week after Hurricane Harvey slammed into the southeast Texas coast, thousands of residents remain stranded without food or water. And the dangers arising from the unprecedented flooding seem to increase by the day – from hospitals forced to shutter and chemical plant fires, to sewage failures.

Over a six day period, this single storm has dumped nearly 27 trillion gallons of water over Texas and Louisiana, seriously damaging or destroying more than 100,000 homes, and a death toll that currently stands at 47 and is expected to significantly rise as the water levels begin to recede.

While it’s still too early to estimate, Harvey may very well end up being one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history with a price tag upwards of $70 billion. The cost just to remove debris from the city of Houston will likely approach $100 million.

Stepping-up and pitching-in

The pictures and emails I’ve received from friends and clients across the affected region are genuinely heartbreaking. But just as we as compassionate citizens opened out heart and wallets in the aftermath of Katrina and Sandy, I’m sure we’ll do the same in the wake of this devastating storm.

I often ask advisors I work with to describe their future company to me. With very few exceptions, the responses I get overwhelmingly revolve around incremental change. It’s understandable.

As business owners, we reflexively cling to the present when planning the future – falling back on the tried and true “well, we’ve always done it this way,” or “yes, I know technology has improved by leaps and bounds, but let’s first focus on improving things at the margins.” We quickly become stuck in a rut because we think small; looking for ways to add operational efficiency to processes and procedures that quite possibly should be blown up and completely restructured.

It's always a good time for financial advisory teams to fine-tune their marketing plans. It’s vital that the team remains focused on reaching defined marketing and client acquisition goals they set in the beginning of the year. These are 10 practices that our research has shown to be integral to the marketing plans of successful financial advisors.

If we only had a dollar for every time we’ve heard an advisor say “I’d really prefer not to add new team members because I just don’t like managing people.” Mind you, these are the very same advisors who are phenomenal at managing client relationships – highly adept at deciphering precisely what their clients hope to achieve and creating strategies to help them reach those objectives. So exactly HOW is that any different from managing team member relationships?

The best in the business know that a critical part of their role is mentoring, coaching and developing their team. It's extremely important to gain the skills and experiences they will need in order to be even more valuable to the future team. It begins with developing a higher sense of self-awareness in the individual and a keener awareness of others: two of the most important emotional intelligence skills.

You didn’t become the founder of a successful financial advisory practice without having a host of extraordinary talents – from strong rainmaking and relationship management skills to advisory and technical expertise. Early on, out of necessity, you had no choice but to become a jack-of-all-trades. As your practice grows and matures, however, it’s imperative that you learn to move beyond the lone ranger mindset and more tightly define and constrain your role in the firm.

Whether you call it outcomes-based financial planning, goals-based wealth management, or some other moniker, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s an essential component of being a true fiduciary. That’s because being a great steward of other people’s money is ultimately about helping each individual achieve the outcomes they dream – whether their goal is a simple comfortable retirement or a second yacht anchored in the Mediterranean.

In general, entrepreneurs are successful because they can see a future that nobody else sees, and imagine things that others simply can’t bring themselves to envision. How many of us twenty years ago could have imagined carrying around a device with more than 120 million times the power of the guidance computer that successfully landed and returned Apollo 11? Yet today, nearly two billion of us worldwide are doing precisely that with our smartphones.

Understandably, very few advisors are natural marketing or branding experts. After all, there are only so many hours in the day, with client and operational demands typically keeping your plate more than full. However, effective marketing materials are essential to acquiring new clients, keeping existing clients engaged and satisfied, and providing your loyal client advocates and professional advocate network with the essential tools to make introductions.

It’s a statistic you’ve all heard repeatedly and one that understandably sends a shudder through most firms: 90-95% of inheritors fire their parents’ advisor once the intergenerational wealth transfer has occurred. However, what’s far less frequently discussed, and directly related to both asset retention, is that upwards of 70% of wealth transfers ultimately fail.

In my last blog, we explored strategies that can help drive a greater share of wallet from your existing clients. Now, we will take a look outside at some potential strategies to drive “inorganic growth” by bringing new clients into the firm. Before you turn your eyes outside to the challenge of acquisition, there are two critical areas that will require a significant amount of strategic thought: your value proposition and your niche.